Setting up a common production flow

April 30, 2019

Jan Cerman

When you work on content with others, effective collaboration is key. To achieve it, your colleagues need to know when it's their turn. For instance, people in roles such as editor-in-chief, external contributor, and compliance manager have different responsibilities. They might need to see content that is assigned only to them and be certain of the next steps when moving content further. Let's see how collaboration in such a scenario is going to work with these three different roles.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to configure a production process (as outlined above) in Kentico Cloud. You'll create a few custom roles, set up your content workflow, and learn how it all works together.

Table of contents

Production flow example

Each role has a specific purpose in the content production flow. External contributors may work only on content that's been assigned to them. Compliance managers can suggest changes to content, but from a legal standpoint, can neither edit nor publish content. The editor-in-chief might step in at any stage of the production flow in case something happens. Here's what it looks like when users in these roles work together.

The editor-in-chief prepares a content brief stating what needs to be written for an article. The editor-in-chief then assigns the work to an external contributor, who is notified about the assignment via email. The contributor then starts writing content. When the contributor is done, they sendit to the editor-in-chief for a review. This copywriting ↔ review process can go back and forth as many times as needed, until the content is perfect.

Once the content is written and editorially reviewed, the editor-in-chief sends the article to a compliance manager for legal review. If there are any legal disputes, the compliance manager sends the article back to the editor-in-chief with notes and comments for further review. Otherwise, the compliance manager approves the article for publishing. The editor-in-chief then either schedules or publishes the article.

The whole collaboration process can be illustrated with the following schema.

How to configure the production flow in Kentico Cloud?

In the following sections, you'll learn how to set up the production flow described above in a few steps:

Create custom roles for each group of users.

Customize your project's content workflow.

Invite users to your project and assign them the new roles.

At the end, your Kentico Cloud project will be prepared for collaboration among these groups of users.

Preparing the roles

Each role requires a different set of capabilities, based on what the users in the role need to do. See how to add custom roles and create the following roles in your project.

Editor-in-Chief

Editors-in-Chief can see and manage all content and assets in the project. They invitecolleagues to the project and might adjust the workflow from time to time. Also, it's quite likely they'll need to adjust content models (such as content types or taxonomy) as well.

Note that the capability to publish content is determined by content workflow and we'll cover it later in the tutorial.

External contributor

External contributors can view and edit content assigned to them.

This means an external contributor has the following role capabilities:

Content production: View assigned content, Edit assigned content

Compliance manager

Compliance managers can view content assigned to them and add comments if they find any issues. However, they cannot publish nor unpublish content (you'll set up this restriction in content workflow later in the tutorial).

With the new roles ready, you still need to link these roles to the project's workflow steps. That way your users get to work only on items in such phase of the content workflow that's relevant to them.

Setting up content workflow

For the purposes of this tutorial, you'll need a non-linear content workflow with the following workflow steps: Draft, Copywriting, Editor review, Legal review, Approved for publishing, and Scheduled / Published.

First, see how to add workflow steps. Second, create the following workflow steps in your project. For each step, there's a description of its configuration (workflow transitions and role limitations) and the meaning behind it.

Draft step

Transitions to step: Copywriting

Limited to roles: Editor-in-Chief

Meaning: Editor-in-Chief uses the Draft step to create content briefs for new articles.

Copywriting step

Transitions to step: Editor review

Limited to roles: Editor-in-Chief and External contributor

Meaning: When external contributors are done, they can send their work for editorial review. The role of Editor-in-Chief is there in case they need to step in.

Editor review step

Transitions to steps: Legal review and Copywriting

Limited to role: Editor-in-Chief

Meaning: The Editor-in-Chief can either submit the article to a contributor for a rewrite, or pass it on to a compliance manager for a legal review.

Legal review step

Transitions to steps: Editor review and Approved for publishing

Limited to roles: Editor-in-Chief and Compliance manager

Meaning: The compliance manager can either submit the article for another editorial review or approve it for publishing. The role of Editor-in-Chief is there in case they need to step in.

Approved for publishing step

Transitions to steps: Editor review and Scheduled / Published

Limited to role: Editor-in-Chief

Meaning: The transition to the Editor review step is there as a safeguard in case anything needs to be changed at this point.

Scheduled / Published step

Limited to role: Editor-in-Chief

Meaning: Editors-in-Chief are the only ones who schedule or publish content items. Also, they can create new versions of content whenever it needs to be revised in the future, or unpublish if it's no longer needed and can be archived.

After you're done with configuration, your content workflow might look like this (depending on the colors you choose):

Inviting users

Once you’re done with the roles and workflow, make sure to invite users to your project and assign the new roles to them. When inviting, you can also assign the roles to multiple users at the same time.

Now, your users will see the content items relevant to them in Content & Assets and will know how to progress content further based on the content workflow.

What's next?

This is the baseline example of how custom roles and content workflow can help you and your colleagues collaborate more easily on producing content. You can build upon the examples showcased in this tutorial and tweak them to suit your own production flow.

To learn more about the ins and outs of custom roles and workflow, check out the following articles: